When the words rustle no more,
And the last work's done,
When the bolt lies deep in the door,
And Fire, our Sun,
Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor;

When from the clock's last chime to the next
chime
Silence beats his drum,
And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother
Time
Wheeling and whispering come,
She with the mould of form and he with the loom
of rhyme :

Then twittering out in the night my thought-
birds flee,
I am emptied of all my dreams :
I only hear Earth turning, only see
Ether's long bankless streams,
And only know I should drown if you laid not
your hand on me.

Monday, 30 January 2012

Out walking in Derbyshire yesterday. It was a frosty, misty start, but once up in the hills we could see the valleys below still full of mist, great lakes of it bordered by grey-blue hills. A beautiful sight. I didn't have my camera, so the picture above will have to do.

It was one of those sights where you just stand for a while and gaze, drinking it in because it can't last and only rarely will it be repeated.

In Science News there is a report on statistical research into correlations between voting patterns and election fraud.

Scientists analyzing data from several recent international contests, including the questionable 2011 parliamentary elections in Russia, have proposed a new mathematical measure to discern fraudulent elections from fair ones.

Fair enough.

The researchers examined voter turnout and votes received by the winning party for recent parliamentary elections in Russia, Austria, Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and for presidential elections in Uganda and the United States. Graphing the relationship between turnout and votes for the winner revealed unusual peaks in the data for the elections in Russia and Uganda — a signature of funny business, the scientists contend.

Excellent work chaps. But then we are told :-

Thousands of precincts in Russia and districts in Uganda reported 100 percent voter turnout with 100 percent of those votes for the winning party, the researchers found. Graph these data various ways and the fraud signature pops out.

Graph these data various ways? I'm not sure I'd need to go that far - and I'm not even a statistician. In fact the words Russia and Uganda would be enough for me.

Sunday, 29 January 2012

I don’t do economics
in this blog, partly because I’m not an economist and partly because I’m not
really sure if anyone else is either. This is what Henry Hazlitt says in his classic Economics in One Lesson, first published in 1946 and still in print. I don't entirely agree with him about medicine.

ECONOMICS is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests.

While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

Of course there are other areas which this criticism fits equally well, climate science being just one. To my mind, this well-known, long-term problem with economics doesn't feel resolvable. Who would resolve it and how? Whom are we to believe when listening to all the money-talk?

Maybe blogs are a start, because as far as I can see, many bloggers on economic matters seem to want much more clarity and honesty in economic debates. Official sources of economic lore are presumably no so good in Hazlitt's terms because they are paid-for sources. But that applies to many other subjects too. Most of them in fact.

A sour view of social life from George Eliot. For me this is one of Eliot's most uncomfortable quotes, almost impossible to read through without thinking of real people one knows or once knew.

The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often
virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or
lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being, may
be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with
them – like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes
colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low
suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else’s life no better
than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.

Friday, 27 January 2012

Research by Dr J C Barnes et al, from the University of Texas, Dallas, claims to have found a strong genetic link between genes and criminality. However, Dr Barnes also believes there is no single criminality gene:-

The overarching conclusions were that genetic influences in life-course persistent offending were larger than environmental influences. For abstainers, it was roughly an equal split: genetic factors played a large role and so too did the environment. For adolescent-limited offenders, the environment appeared to be most important.

If we’re showing that genes have an overwhelming influence on who gets put onto the life-course persistent pathway, then that would suggest we need to know which genes are involved and at the same time, how they’re interacting with the environment so we can tailor interventions.

But there are likely to be hundreds, if not thousands, of genes that will incrementally increase your likelihood of being involved in a crime even if it only ratchets that probability by 1 percent. It still is a genetic effect. And it’s still important.

Honestly, I hope people when they read this, take issue and start to debate it and raise criticisms because that means people are considering it and people are thinking about it.

As ever, this kind of nature/nurture research comes across, at least to me, as inconclusive, simply because there is no demonstration of a gene causing a criminal act. Maybe that is too stringent a requirement, but until it is met, there is no demonstration of cause and effect. Even so, the attitude expressed in the last paragraph is refreshing.

What about the comment so we can tailor interventions though? Where does that lead us I wonder?

Thursday, 26 January 2012

Being Ignored Hurts, Even by a Stranger

Feeling like you’re part of the gang is crucial to the human experience. All people get stressed out when we’re left out. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that a feeling of inclusion can come from something as simple as eye contact from a stranger.

As with many such studies, the first obvious question is how come they didn't know that? Actually I suspect they did, but I suppose all professions need their pot-boilers.

Anyhow, it set me wondering if our political elite are in the same boat as these behind the curve psychologists. Maybe they have theoretical difficulties with the importance of human contact too?

Because surely the point of democracy is human contact writ large. Democracy is supposed to involve us with the ruling elite and involve the ruling elite with us. Instead of riding by in their carriages, eyes averted from the common throng, the elite are supposed to have learned the mutual benefits of social cohesion. We get a few more crusts and they don't get so many riots and rude words scrawled on their carriage paintwork. Democracy is supposed to promote exactly that kind of give and take across the divide.

It's a social thing we are supposed to have learned and tucked away forever in the treasure-chest of important lessons we must never forget.

Except we've forgotten it.

The elite have reverted to being strangers - and as of old seem sublimely unaware of their own behaviour. They always tended that way of course, but democracy was supposed to maintain some kind of balance - at least as far as the ballot box and electoral law might contrive.

So that's another lesson we have to relearn, step by bloody painful step.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

Science News reports on a global shrubbery threat from Boxwood blight, caused by a Cylindrocladium fungus which was...

...unknown to science before 2000 but has now spread through Europe and New Zealand. In October, U.S. authorities confirmed that the blight had jumped continents, with infections confirmed in North Carolina and Connecticut. By mid-January, with growers and pathologists on alert, the fungus had turned up in at least five more states — Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Oregon — and British Columbia.

The blight starts with spots on leaves and black streaks on twigs. Within a few weeks, a plump shrub can turn into a clump of bare sticks.

I saw a cloud pruned box hedge like the one pictured quite recently. Personally I wouldn't have the patience and I'd probably treat a bit of blight as an opportunity to grow something easier. Like a fence.

One of the dilemmas we are frequently faced with, is how to draw
boundaries to acceptable behaviour without falling foul of ambiguous cases
where the boundary rules lead to situations we didn’t foresee or want to happen.

As I grow older, I tend to grow more tolerant (don’t laugh)
but I also tend to think we need our boundaries warts and all. Why? Because it
seems to me that in trying to accommodate all those tricky cases where our
boundary rules don’t quite work, we just end up losing the boundary.

What triggered my musing on this was a post by that
wise old blogger David Duff who wrote a post about abortion clinics being allowed to advertise on TV. David drew a very
clear line in the sand, and although I’ve never been what you might call a
pro-lifer, I found myself agreeing with him.

Lines in the sand may indeed lead to a harsh inflexibility which we didn’t intend, but if they aren’t there, then the outcome may well
turn out worse. Lines in the sand do at least allow us a fighting chance to avoid
malign social trends we never would have planned.

Imagine an Earth-like planet one thousand light years from Earth. Because I have a touch of mawkish poetry in my soul, I'll give it the name Dream. Intelligent beings have evolved on Dream and to nobody’s surprise they are called Dreamers.

Now it just so happens that Dreamers understand Euclidian geometry so the angles of a Dream triangle add up to two right angles. However Dreamers choose to measure angles, the three angles of their triangles must add up to two right angles.

What's the alternative? It seems to me that the alternative is one where Dreamers do not understand the properties of triangles because geometry is a human invention unique to Earth. Let us be daring and dismiss this as anthropocentric simply because it is anthropocentric.

Imagine a Dreamer named Veracity. One day Veracity travels to her favourite spot to be alone for a while. This favourite spot is a lake near to her home - a body of water much like ours with Dream fish in it and Dream insects flitting across the surface. The sun sets slowly in the East as Veracity sits by her lake and for some reason begins to reflect on the properties of triangles - and yes I know how unlikely that is.

Language aside, Veracity’s thoughts should have something in common with ours when she considers the three interior angles of her triangle. Veracity should know the angles add up to two right angles and may be able to prove it. As she sits by the lake, the logic in her thoughts must have the same logical form as our thoughts because the logic of triangles is the same for Veracity as it is for us. It is not possible for the properties of a triangle differ between Earth and Dream because if they did, then the universe would be unintelligible.

In my view, this thought experiment suggests that human minds and Dreamer minds cannot form theories which are all unique to Earth and Dream. The natural ability to theorise about reality cannot arise in complete isolation on Earth and Dream. Our theories cannot be entirely shaped by unique locally-based evolutionary pressures.

In other words, John Prescott notwithstanding, understanding must to some extent be moulded by what is understood.

It is tempting to assume that intelligent aliens will be entirely different to human beings because this seems to presuppose nothing and feels much less anthropocentric. But although intelligent aliens may be physically different to human beings with entirely different senses, at least some of their true theories must reflect the logical form of natural law as ours do.

Our ability to theorise is a natural ability – as natural as the way gravity makes water flow downhill and caused the mythical apple to fall on Newton’s head. Our theories must reflect the reality of what is possible and not possible, what makes sense and does not make sense, what is necessary and what is not.

My photo above doesn't do justice to this extraordinary work - it is 17ft x 11ft and I'd have needed a stepladder to take a better view. It is thought to have been painted by a travelling artist-monk and depicts the Ladder of Salvation of the Human Soul together with Purgatory and Hell. As I gazed at it, I couldn't help feeling I'd like to have known that travelling monk. A robust character I suspect.

The whole picture is in the form of a cross, formed by the Ladder and the horizontal division between Heaven and Hell. Starting at the lower right, we have the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, loaded with fruit, with Satan as a serpent in the branches.

Two devils hold up a bridge of spikes which dishonest tradesmen have to cross. First, the blacksmith making a horseshoe without his anvil, then a mason without a chisel, the spinners without a distaff, and a potter without a wheel. Below the bridge, the usurer is sitting in flames. He is blind, money pours from his mouth, and he has to count it all (avarice). On his right two figures represent envy, while on the left, two figures embrace - lust. The remaining deadly sins are scattered around in small scenes to the left of the ladder.

The church itself is very attractive too - here it is in the snow:-

If you are interested, then the mural is a rare and remarkable sight and well worth a bit of a detour.

Minuscule amounts of ethanol, the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, can more than double the life span of a tiny worm known as Caenorhabditiselegans, which is used frequently as a model in aging studies, UCLA biochemists report. The scientists said they find their discovery difficult to explain.

However, the researchers are shocked by the results of their research:-

"This finding floored us — it's shocking," said Steven Clarke, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and the senior author of the study, published Jan. 18 in the online journal PLoS ONE, a publication of the Public Library of Science.

Unfortunately, the level of alcohol involved does not amount to a great night out: -

"The concentrations correspond to a tablespoon of ethanol in a bathtub full of water or the alcohol in one beer diluted into a hundred gallons of water," Clarke said.

I’ve reached that age we all reach sooner or later where a scary chunk of history
happened during my lifetime and I’m wondering what to make of it in an
optimistic kind of way. Because I don’t want to sink into that cast of mind
where you remember everything as better than it is now - the good old days that were no such thing.

Even so, after giving this question quite a bit of thought,
I do think some things are getting worse. On the whole I think important areas of my bit of the
universe have gone into decline.

It isn’t necessarily a catastrophe, because we adapt
and we’ll no doubt adapt to whatever it is lurking just below our horizon. No use trying to predict what that may be though. It’ll just
happen and we’ll react, but if the lot in charge don’t change more than
somewhat, we’ll won’t react in time and we’ll not make the best of things. As
usual.

I certainly don't see a uniform decline - some things are better
than they were. We have more money, better access to information and life is
generally more comfortable for most, even those living in so-called poverty. But in getting to where we are now, we didn’t
improve many of the things we should have improved and others we made worse.

For me, a major aspect of the decline is being lied to by political leaders, big business, the BBC and major institutions as a matter of routine. I don’t like all the lying – apart from
anything else it isn’t dignified for a supposedly civilised country. Lying should not be a profession, a business-tool or a career move, but it has become all of these things. We don't confront it properly either - because all that lying gets in our way.

We are evasive too. Of course all periods of history had their taboo subjects, those things which should have been brought out into the open but never were. But during my life we've disposed of some taboo subjects and replaced them with others, or we've made some subjects difficult to discuss, such as attitudes to racial and cultural differences and the decline of the nuclear family. The lying we barely discuss at all, yet truthfulness was once seen as important.

We in the UK can't pretend to be a nation any longer either - not in the sense I grew up with. The loss of our British nation and with it our democracy looms large for me,
because I can’t see any possibility of resuscitating what my father helped fight a war to
preserve. In a way I feel responsible, that my generation has taken most of life's goodies and allowed the important things to slide, democracy and respect for truth being the big ones for me.

Education too. It's a complex issue I know, but I feel that at the very
least it hasn’t been improved during my lifetime. For example, who now trusts
exam results?

How about science? Well science was my career, but it has declined
enormously even during my lifetime. Now much of it is silly, exaggerated or even downright fraudulent and polluted by ghastly would-be science celebrities who say things for effect and play down uncertainties. As for climate science - well utterly shameful is all I can bring myself to say about that at the moment.

Materially things are better and the freedom to write this
blog and say these things is a great plus. I’m sitting here in a warm
room with my laptop and with a few clicks I can
explore a world far bigger than anything I ever imagined a few decades ago. In
that respect life is good.

But it should have been better, more honest, more civilized and less silly. To make it so, I’d have
willingly done without some of the material progress - maybe even all of it. Now I suspect it's too late.

Friday, 20 January 2012

All you aquarians out there are in luck, because an unusually vivid flash of inspiration will blow your mind the next time you buy socks from the Post Office. Quite what this flash of inspiration may be, the stars aren't prepared to say, but it could be either a completely new shade of bathroom paint or a cunning plan to avoid global Armageddon. Exciting times.

Next Tuesday is another unusual day as you are invited to contribute to British Knitwear Week. Quite how you became a knitwear expert is impossible for even Saturn to discern, but get in some training is what the stars advise because this may be your big break. But a new set of knitting needles is step one and I hope I don't have to explain why. No more hints, but this isn't Fairisle territory so think dramatic!

The next big thing in your life is a cruise or screws - I can't quite make out which, but surely it could be good news either way don't you think?

As usual we have to consider work and your prospects of promotion. Things are a little murky at the moment, but you may as well speak your mind at work because your colleagues will respect you for it. Well Librans won't, of course, but what do you expect from them and their silly scales and so-called rational arguments? Stick to your guns and don't volunteer crucial information without a real flourish may be the best tactic.

If you are a decision-maker, then try to make your decisions more mysterious than perhaps they may have been in the past. Just a hint, but clarity isn't always a good career tactic - as the stars seem to know well, blast them.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

He was chained by every friend who had made
life agreeable – bound not to shock or lose them. He was chained by every
dollar he had made, every automobile he had manufactured – they meant a duty to
his caste. He was chained by every hour he had worked – they left him stiff,
spiritually rheumatic.Sinclair Lewis – Dodsworth

Sinclair Lewis' 1929 novel was turned into a play in 1934 and a film.in 1936. My quote is from the novel and it sums up the theme of the book quite succinctly. Sam Dodsworth is an automobile manufacturer going through a late mid-life crisis as he realises how much his material success has simply loaded him with obligations, the main one being his shallow wife.

Eventually Dodsworth finds fulfillment by leaving behind both wife and business obligations. No real surprises I suppose, but I like Sinclair Lewis and this is a novel I'll probably read again some day.

In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in Rome on January 10, 1951, aged 65, from advanced alcoholism.

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

As most of us know, as soon as you poke around the murky world of major charities, you soon run into a mysterious tangle of issues and links which could soon lead even the most generous of us to wonder why we give to big charities at all.

For example, Comic Relief seems to be linked indirectly with the European Climate Foundation (ECF), one of many climate propaganda outfits. The link is through the Children's Investment Fund Foundation (CIF) to which Comic Relief has contributed, along with the Elton John AIDS Foundation and The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.

For some reason CIF has taken an interest in climate matters and is listed as one of ECF's funding partners - as the ECF rather coyly refers to its donor organistations.

Imagine a bowl of rainwater. The bowl sits on a small
table in my back garden. A few raindrops fall and I see one single drop fall into
the centre of the bowl, causing a tiny splash and a brief cycle of concentric ripples which soon
die away. Then the sun comes out and the flurry of rain disappears.

Once the ripples in the bowl have died away, how do I know
they ever happened? What evidence is there?

There is no evidence - so it didn’t happen.

Or at least it didn’t happen if we take evidence as our
criterion of truth, because I have no evidence of those ripples even though I saw them only minutes ago. No evidence means they didn’t happen as far as the outside world is concerned, because I can't prove it and surely we must be consistent in these matters?

Most of the universe makes an unimaginably vast cascade of
such tiny changes, those changes that leave no evidence, changes we can
never reconstruct because the universe doesn’t do audit trails. An atom absorbs
a stray photon, changes its energy level by a single quantum then emits another
photon and drops back to its original state. An unrecorded change leaving
behind no evidence.

So it didn’t happen.

Except it did happen, but the universe doesn’t need to prove
it, doesn’t need to prove anything. We humans sometimes need proof because we have to
convince someone else, but the universe doesn’t have to prove anything to
anyone - ever. So we have problems, paradoxes, conflicting evidence and things we can sometimes explain, but
never completely. We, the social
we, aren’t a single entity and have to gather evidence and and present it to each other which only works if the same thing happens again to other people.

So what about those personal things we experience and the personal way we experience them? Because your experiences are yours, not mine. What about the purely personal events that leave no public audit trail? Like that drop of water, but more important than that, more personally significant?

Public evidence has to be our criterion of public truth, but where does that leave our private experiences? We have to express them in a public language even to ourselves, but in so doing, do we miss something real, something important?

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

A characteristic of the modern world seems to be the feral
technocrat. These are people who often, but not necessarily have some kind of
technical qualification, who sell themselves to the cause of modifying our
behaviour from a platform of biased, misleading or otherwise untrue technical
information – always lifestyle-related.

Bent statistics and fake charities seem to be the tools of
choice. Manipulated percentages, dishonest conclusions from partial data or
even simple lies in a statistical garb, it’s all grist to the mill.

For example, check out something important and seriously
scary - brain tumours. There is no clear lifestyle issue with brain tumours, so
it hasn’t become a one-sided political game played by the feral technocrats and
their backers. Yet consider the current UK brain tumour situation as laid out
in this e-petition.

65% more women die from a brain tumour than from cervical cancer.

Brain tumours are the biggest cancer killer of UK children.

16,000 people each year in the UK are diagnosed with a brain tumour.

More people under 40 die of a brain tumour than from any other cancer.

Only 14% of those diagnosed with a brain tumour survive beyond 5 years.

25% of all cancers spread to the brain.

Every year there is a 4% increase in incidence.

I’m not advocating any particular policy change with respect
to brain tumour research here. I’m merely using a very serious health issue to
highlight how the games played by feral technocrats may result in large
numbers of people being misinformed about more genuine health risks where maybe
we could and should direct some more research funding.

Let’s note the first five points of the e-petition and ask ourselves why on earth our government finds it necessary to employ feral technocrats to demonize second-hand cigarette smoke when this is going on? People, including children, are dying in the real world out there – real lingering deaths not fake statistical artefacts. Courageous kids with big smiles and no hair because of the radiotherapy which isn’t likely to work anyway.

But the feral technocrats have been paid to demonize our lifestyle choices that do not meet with official approval so that is what they do. Sadly they even seem to believe in it. Forget unknown non-lifestyle issues like brain tumours. Forget facts, rational priorities and simple human fellow-feeling. There are political games to play and always there are feral technocrats willing to play. It’s one of the many prices we pay for voting in the Big Three.

But when a miser thinks nothing save money
or coins, or an ambitious man of nothing save honour, these are not thought to
be insane, for they are harmful and are thought worthy of hatred. But in truth,
avarice, ambition, lust, etc., are nothing but species of madness, although
they are not enumerated among diseases.

Spinoza had a thing about ambition. In his strangely austere writings, there are very few hints of the man behind the words because he wanted his philosophy to be judged purely on its own merits. Nobody now writes like Spinoza and I suppose few ever did. The need to persuade is too strong.

Whenever you see this kind of report, you are left wondering if anyone plans to use it. At least I am. Or is it just another stage in development programmes which are inevitable and have been going on since the invention of gunpowder?

Sunday, 15 January 2012

To reach the dietary holy grail of five portions of fruit and veg per day, I tend to count anything of vegetable origin because it makes the accounting simpler. So my five a day for today comprises :-

Coffee

With a tot of rum

Dark chocolate

Dried figs

White wine

Not bad eh? Notice the clever way you can count coffee twice by adding a tot of rum. Two tots don't bump up your five a day any further though. One has to play fair when doing one's bit for the government and dear old Blighty.

For whatever a man imagines that he cannot
do, he imagines it necessarily, and by that very imagination he is so disposed
that in truth he cannot do what he imagines he cannot do. For so long as he
imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long is he determined not to do it:
and consequently, so long it is impossible to him that he should do it.
However, if we pay attention to these things, which depend solely on opinion,
we shall be able to conceive that a man should under-estimate himself.

Saturday, 14 January 2012

Games are-a-changing almost constantly nowadays, and estimates from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) that the Peoples Republic of China has some 1275tnft3 of technically-recoverable shale gas, enough to last around 300 years, can certainly be regarded as a significant one.

Currently China is a major importer of natural gas, so exploiting its own vast shale gas reserves has obvious attractions for them. How does all this affect Chinese commitments to international CO2 reduction targets? Will they shift to wind power and leave the gas in the ground? Certainly the Chinese have made a considerable investment in wind-power, but the decision has already been made :-

Therefore, it would appear that the shift to shale gas in China is already well underway and while the geology for shale gas drilling has been reported as being more difficult in China than in the US, it is unlikely, given the way in which the Chinese nation goes about achieving a goal, that geology will get in the way for long.

China probably intends to become energy independent. Quite why the UK government thinks wind power should be assessed on anything but a basis of pragmatic national interest is a mystery.

Philosopher – What if evolution itself is subject, among
other things, to moral law. What if moral law, the logic of looking after your own
kind, shaped genetic evolution? What if the gene is merely a causal tool in the
overriding logic of moral law such that even the double helix was shaped by it?
Scientist - "But moral law isn't scientific law."Philosopher - No but genes may have evolved to reflect the moral law of looking after your own kind. Moral law may have come first - genes second.

Thursday, 12 January 2012

This is just a bit of musing about consensus. It isn’t really about teaching, although that’s the vehicle I’ve used.

Suppose there is an important issue where almost everyone adopts one of two standpoints, but one standpoint is far more widely publicised than the other.

C is the consensus - widely publicised.

A is the alternative - much less widely publicised.

If the issue is appropriate for children, would schools teach C, A or both?

I think only C would be taught because our nationalised education has become part of what we mean by consensus. For certain issues, the consensus is a consensus because that’s what we teach children. It’s a necessary but not a sufficient criterion of certain types of consensus.

Suppose C is easily shown to be invalid in that it cannot be used to make reliable predictions about the real world. Clearly C will still be taught in schools because if it wasn’t it would no longer be the consensus - it would have failed a necessary criterion.

I see this as a logical argument about consensus rather than teaching. Neither do I see it as an argument about data such as the content of a real syllabus. Once the premises are accepted, the conclusion follows, but are there any other conclusions?

Obviously, unless we say that the consensus is always valid, then at least some of what we teach children must be invalid and known to be invalid by some people, almost certainly including some teachers.

But the people who know this don’t count unless they change the consensus from C to A. Otherwise C will be perpetuated in schools, possibly until there is nobody left who understands A.

Two conclusions and a question:-

Some teachers some of the time know they are teaching rubbish.

The consensus doesn’t have to be valid, it just has to be the consensus.

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

A curse on your generation, child. They will open the
mountain and drag forth the golden wings and coin them into money, and the
solemn faces they will break up into ear-rings for wanton women! And they shall
get themselves a new name, but the angel of ignominy, with the fiery brand,
shall know them, and their heart shall be the tomb of dead desires that turn
their life to rottenness.

There's lots of clever technology going on here, but the core of this demo is still based around pick-and-place.

For its main task of pouring liquid, Honda's Asimo isn't doing anything much more sophisticated than the laboratory robots I worked with twenty years ago. Asimo itself will be far more sophisticated, but it doesn't seem to be achieving much in practical terms. The main practical differences seem to be :-

the self-propelled walking*

wireless operation*

the sophisticated hands

object location and identification.

* But note what looks like a huge battery pack on its back.

No doubt it's clever stuff, but progress seems slow to me. Maybe I'm being over-critical and it just needs another twenty years of chipping away at the problems, but I'm also cynical enough to wonder which budget funds Asimo's development - R&D or PR?

Most of my fiction reading is based on the so-called classics, Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Proust, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair etc etc. I’ve often wondered why my taste meandered in this direction though - because it wandered all over the place before I settled on the classics. The only genre I missed out was romance, but most novels are romances anyway. It wasn’t a conscious decision or anything like that. I just ended up preferring the classics, but why?

I may as well say from the start that I’m not entirely sure about the answer, but I think it probably comes in two parts.

Firstly it’s to do with the way the classics take you back to the origins of the novel as fictional writing to be enjoyed. Novels, at least in the UK, originated during a time where craftsmanship (and craftwomanship) still sat alongside early mass-production as epitomised by the dark satanic mills. Novels were carefully crafted for a well-educated readership and I think it shows.

Secondly and far more importantly I think, there is a parallel-world aspect, almost like science fiction but more real. Classic novels depict worlds which once existed but have now gone, worlds similar to our own, but still far enough removed to fascinate by their multitude of differences.

There really was a Dickensian London with its debtor’s prisons and workhouses, a Russia where the elite spoke French, admired Paris fashions and English guns and bought serfs to run their estates. There really was a freewheeling America where people like George F. Babbitt plied their trade and climbed the social ladder.

My absorption with classic fiction isn’t historical though, but more cultural. Things can be different because they have been different - and will be different again. So as evening falls, it's time to draw the curtains, light a candle, stoke the fire and with a glass of wine at my elbow, revisit Victorian England with Wilkie Collins as my guide.

Science, then, may be
defined as a habit or formed faculty of demonstration, with all the further
qualifications which are enumerated in the Analytics. It is necessary to add
this, because it is only when the principles of our knowledge are accepted and
known to us in a particular way, that we can properly be said to have
scientific knowledge; for unless these principles are better known to us than
the conclusions based upon them, our knowledge will be merely accidental.

Okay, Aristotle didn’t quite get round to climate models,
but it’s worth going back to basics when we take a look at the claims made
about them. Why? Because they have wasted colossal sums of money and still
threaten to blight the lives of our children and grandchildren. As Aristotle seems to have grasped two and a half millennia ago, science is all about demonstration, but climate models have yet to demonstrate anything of value.

So let us take Aristotle’s principle of demonstration a little further and apply it to climate
models. It’s a good principle even though now call
our demonstrations experiments. In
that case, there are three key elements to consider if computer models are to
be used for predicting important climate parameters such as temperature.

The output of the computer model – the prediction.

The state of the climate –
the standard.

The correlation between them – the demonstration.

In other words, a climate model that purports to predict
global temperatures over the next thirty years must demonstrate significant
correlation with the actual climate for thirty years. Or at the very least, it must demonstrate a significant degree of correlation with the real climate over
significant period of time.

There is no other test – no other demonstration.

The only area for latitude is the degree of correlation we
might count as a successful demonstration. Successfully predicting a number of
climate cycles would be good. We may be talking centuries rather than decades
for that, but a high degree of correlation could possibly shorten it to a few
decades.

Unfortunately, the models have so far failed to predict
global temperatures and the current warming hiatus of the past decade. In fact nobody is making a systematic and serious effort to demonstrate their long-term predictive skill. We are supposed to take them on
trust, but that just won’t do will it? The basic scientific principle of
demonstration is being violated.

When basic principles are involved, such as the principle of
demonstration, then I think it pays to be blunt about what these climate
modelling guys are doing – the value of their activities for the rest of us who
play the game with a somewhat straighter bat. These are my conclusions.

Climate models are useless and every penny spent on them has
been wasted.

Sunday, 8 January 2012

The truth is even if China could sell panels to installers for 1¢/watt, the systems would still be too expensive. Even with free PV, the cost of installation, mounting structure, inverters, wiring, etc. make the systems financially unsustainable.

In other words, solar is not competitive with the US national grid even if the Chinese could be persuaded to give away the panels for nothing.

Well I for one find it a rather odd business, this mish-mash of ideas we call logic. Aristotle made a start with his syllogisms, but over two thousand years later logicians tried to turn it into a game of symbols and rules so they could run off with it and build careers. Electronics engineers build computers with it, while politicians and climate scientists never use it at all.

[mass noun]1 reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity:experience is a better guide to this than deductive logicthe logic of the argument is faulty

a particular system or codification of the principles of proof and inference:Aristotelian logic

the systematic use of symbolic and mathematical techniques to determine the forms of valid deductive argument.

the quality of being justifiable by reason:there seemed to be a lack of logic in his remarks

(the logic of) the course of action suggested by or following as a necessary consequence of:the logic of private competition was to replace small firms by larger firms

2 a system or set of principles underlying the arrangements of elements in a computer or electronic device so as to perform a specified task.

logical operations collectively.

So logic is, within certain boundaries, a move in the argument game, a rather feeble prop we use in whatever way seems most convincing.

Yet it seems to me that logic has more to offer if only we explore its possibilities, loosen it up and reconnect it with the real world. This is what Spinoza tried to do, but Newton came along and distracted us with his mathematics and mechanistic science of cause and effect. I can't help thinking we could have made more of logic and less of Newton's science, so in future posts I'll make a tentative attempt to expand a little on what might have been.

Saturday, 7 January 2012

Civil servants take official delivery of a new fully-automatic PM module complete with instruction manuals direct from the Chinese assembly plant. The new module will be installed in Downing Street later this month once all the latest apps have been downloaded.

The old model will be recycled, probably as an EU commissioner as that would require very few app changes and no upgrades.

The other night I had a strange dream. I was in a house of
some kind, which was ordinary enough, but it had a flat roof. I only discovered
the flat roof when I found myself on it for some reason, checking out all the
water purification gear parked there.

I’m familiar with water purification, so I knew what it was,
although my dreaming self did think it a little odd to find loads and loads of
it on my roof. In fact the water purification gear turned out to be a complex, rambling plant stretching from my house over to nearby buildings.
It had walkways, tanks, control panels and became more and more intricate
the more I explored it. Then I woke up.

So it was a pretty mundane kind of dream, if a little mixed-up and ridiculous. But what’s going on when we dream? Why are dreams so often weirdly mixed-up? Lots
of people have had their say on dreams, so here’s my offering.

I think dreams are more than weird, I think they are a hint of what keeps us sane.

In a dreaming state we barely respond at all to external
stimuli, but they are where our sanity comes from. Reality moulds us. When we are asleep it can't do its job properly and we tend to respond to mysterious internal
states not directly controlled by current reality.

Reality imposes itself on us every waking second and the competence
of our responses are what our sanity really is. Sanity is a competent response
to reality, leaving aside the rather big questions of what competent
and reality may be.

So while we sleep, the real world is not imposing itself on our
repertoire of behaviours and they are free to mingle and interact in ways which do not need
to make sense and may even be physically impossible such as dreams of flying.

When we wake up after a dream we catch a brief glimpse of our
absolute dependence on reality, because that’s what keeps us sane. We are all,
every one of us, much closer to insanity than we care to admit.

Of course this idea adds a much darker hue to claims such as
those made by climate fanatics who say millions will die because of CO2
emissions. Theirs is an incompetent, mixed-up response to reality and much closer to dreaming than they probably realise. Or is it closer to insanity?

Friday, 6 January 2012

We got our first TV in the fifties. I remember it being
installed with a big aerial shaped like an X on the chimney. As I recall, we were one of the first on our street - something
to do with an uncle being in the trade, the boozer who once dropped the
Christmas cake in the chip pan, but that’s another story.

If Mum had known what was coming, I’m sure
she’d have put her foot down.

The voice-over is Polish, but the subtitles are fine. A good, clear presentation of the basics of shale gas technology by LNG of Canada, even though a few issues are glossed over, such as the chemicals used. The clip below is a community relations film by the same company. The United States Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates Poland's shale-gas reserves at 5.3 trillion cubic metres.

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

China’s Sinopec and Total SA from France made major acquisitions in the US energy sector as they invested US$4.5bn into deals to buy into the country’s shale rock formations.

Sinopec’s Sinopec International Petroleum Exploration & Production Corp made its first foray into US shale with a US$2.2bn investment to create a joint venture with Devon Energy Corp. The purchase gives Sinopec a one-third stake in five fields.

Total concluded a US$2.3bn with Chesapeake Energy in its second joint shale venture with the US firm.

Many US oil and gas producers have been busy buying up rights that allow them to tap into the lucrative shale deposits under development in various states, including Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio. However, to help pay for the expensive hydraulic fracturing technology necessary to extract the gas from the rocks, many require additional investment partners. “It looks like the preferred transaction structure for a lot of these players, whether they are European or Asian, who are behind the curve on this technology. The more exposure they get, the better,” said Mark Hanson, oil and gas analyst at Morningstar Inc.

Now that we know what knowledge is necessary
to us, we must describe the way and method in which we must know with this
knowledge the things that are to be known. To do this, the first thing to be
considered is that this inquiry must not be one stretching back to infinity:
I mean to say that in order to find the
best method of investigating what is true, we must not stand in need of another
method to investigate this method of investigating, nor in need of a third one
to investigate the second, and so on to infinity. For by such a method we can
never arrive at a knowledge of what is true, nor any knowledge whatever.

For me, this Spinoza quote is about conceptual frameworks. If we have a conceptual framework to make sense of some aspect of our lives, then we can't expect to justify it via another conceptual framework, because that in turn would require yet another. We have to settle on a personal philosophy and make the best of it.

We differ of course, in our personal philosophies, but as far as I can see, the best way to deal with that is to find common ground, which often as not is common moral ground. There is no point arguing from within different conceptual frameworks.

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

My first new read for 2012 is the Kindle edition of Nothing to Envy, an account of life in North Korea written by American journalist Barbara Demick who won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for it in 2010.

So far it's proving difficult to put down - a truly grim story well told and a real bargain at £0.99, although the dead tree version is rather more.

Monday, 2 January 2012

I suspect this quote from William James is at least as true today as when he wrote it. It may also be a far more pernicious problem than we are usually prepared to admit, because I think James, whether he knew it or not was foretelling the death of academia.

Whatever universe a professor believes in
must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A
universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial
intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!